Zetta Delivers On-Demand Storage

Company:

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.

Technology Sector: Storage

Key Product: Zetta Enterprise Cloud

Year Founded: 2007

Number of Channel Partners: 5 in the U.S.

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: As customers more and more consider working with IT as a service, solution providers will need to look at alternatives to providing different levels of storage as a service. Zetta offers the chance to talk to customers about moving their primary storage to a service-based model.

The Lowdown: Zetta is the latest developer of technology aimed at building a cloud-based storage infrastructure to come to market, and it plans to build a partner base to help customers look to storage as a service to replace all or part of their primary storage setups.

The Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage offering can deliver the types of enterprise-class storage capabilities -- including data snapshots, replication, and full redundancy -- customers expect from storage appliances without the complexity, said Jeff Treuhaft, CEO and co-founder of Zetta.

"The request-for-proposal and acquisition process is complex," Treuhaft said. "And customers require staff who understand storage. For many of them, complex storage is difficult to find and maintain. And those are our target customers."

As far as the customer is concerned, the Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage platform looks like primary storage, Treuhaft said.

It offers native support for file-based applications, which means that it is accessed as if it were a NAS appliance, and it features plug-and-play integration with compatibility over a broad array of open access protocols, Treuhaft said.

Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage offers data protection, data integrity, security, and privacy, but starts at a price of 25 cents per GByte per month, which includes minimum performance guarantees.

Zetta started engaging with channel partners, including resellers, integrators and service providers, about a year ago, Treuhaft said. The company offers such partners an integrated package, a unique offering that can lead to further service opportunities, and a managed service revenue stream.

"For many resellers, a managed service revenue stream is new to them," he said. "We can provide our resellers with the ability to tap into an enterprise-class infrastructure without the need to build their own infrastructure."